The Horn
Hilton Brown
"The rare and occasional traveller who crosses the long jungle uplands
westward of the Mohnds comes in time to the step-like drop of three
thousand feet into the Gamsatri plain and the little zamindari
township
of Khankota. As you look back from this plain country the bulwark of
the higher levels rises like a wall, a forbidding battlement of black sheet
rock, picked out here and there with the feathery bamboo, which clings
where nothing else can find a roothold.
"Seen thus, it looks impassable; and indeed there is but the one ghat, or
passage, down it in a distance of many miles—one only, that is to say,
which is possible for pack-bullock, pony, or elephant. Down this ghat
the traveller will have come, and
he may pick it out from the plains
below by a roundish black knob at its summit—the grim rock of
Hoondi. So, looking back from the pleasance of these open and
cultivated lands, he may think, perhaps with a shudder, of that gloomy
and sable place; for that
which from below looks like a mere turret or
mound is at close quarters a semi-isolated hill, buttressed on to the
main mountain on the side away from the pass, but hanging over the
ghat path in a sheer and dreadful rock.
"The rock swells out convexly; it
is black as coal, and no plant can find
a holding on its shining face; and over its surface in the old days men—and not only men—have rolled and hurtled down to destruction.
Coming from the uplands you see it blocking the pass ahead like the
rounded back of some monstrous crouching beast; and on the crest of
it are the sad-coloured ruins of the old fort and watch-tower. As you come fairly into the jaws of the pass the rock seems to swell and tower
above you with an extraordinary effect of menacing life;
the
descent
goes in fear and trembling along the valley of a torrent, on whose cruel
stones human beings have ti
m
e and again smashed and broken like
eggs. From the ghat the place looks inaccessible, but it is not really so,
because a path of
sorts, much cut and destroyed by rains, twists away
round the mountain, and carries the venturesome by a flight of
battered steps into the fort itself. Once there, you may see the reason
of its building, for it looks out thirty miles over the upland plateau and
sixty over
the Gamsatri plain. Khankota you cannot see, because it lies
too close to the foot of the hills, and that
is doubtless the reason why
the horn came into being." . . .
